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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader writes "WordPress.com, home to millions of blogs — including major sites such as TechCrunch, has been hit by an "extremely large" distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

According to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, some users may experience performance and connectivity problems as a result.

A statement from Automattic, which was sent to its VIP customers, said that "the size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second" and admitted that it was proving "difficult" to mitigate the attack because of its "extreme size"."Link to Original Source

pbahra writes "One complaint made of the modern stock market is that it is concerned too much on the short term. A second is a long time in cash-equities trading. Four or five years ago, trading firms started to talk of trading speeds in terms of milliseconds. But in recent weeks trading geeks have started to talk about picoseconds in what is a truly mind-boggling concept: a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. Put another way, a picosecond is to one second what one second is to 31,700 years."Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "Small nation of Estonia is to become one of the countries with most electric cars per capita as the state exchanges 10 million AAU-s(carbon emmission credits) to Mitsubishi Corp for 507 iMiev make cars, 250 quick charging stations and state incentives for 500 first electic car buyers"Link to Original Source

Anonymous Coward writes "CNET UK has run the SunSpider benchmark on the iPad 2 and found that it's 4x faster than the original iPad running iOS 4.2 and 1.5x faster when running 4.3. It's also faster than all the Android devices they tested it against, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab."Link to Original Source

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman provides an in-depth comparison of the Xoom vs. the iPad for business contexts. Performance, security, applications, app management — 'the Xoom is a credible competitor to the iPad, even exceeding it in some areas. But it has odd omissions and flaws that Android smartphones do not, making me wonder if the tablet and smartphone teams at Google and Motorola Mobility ever compare notes. It definitely feels as if the Xoom were rushed to market to get in stores before Apple's new iPad announcement,' Gruman writes."Link to Original Source

Stoobalou (1774024) writes "Thinq has an interesting piece on WikiLeaks fund-raising and how it seems that cash intended to support the whistle-blowing site's day-to-day operation is being quietly diverted to support founder Julian Assange's legal battle against rape allegations."Link to Original Source

The Institute of the American Musical in Los Angeles is home to footage collected by one of the earliest pirates —Ray Knight of Jacksonville, Fla. Between 1931 and 1973, Knight would make trips up to Broadway and sneak a 16 mm camera into theaters. He eventually collected footage of over 175 musicals. Knight's family gifted the films — which, in many cases, are the only visual record of many of the earliest musicals — to the Institute of the American Musical when Knight died. But, there's a problem. The institute is a one-person operation that has been housed in a Los Angeles duplex for the past 30 years. The tiny nonprofit is having a hard time finding a way to preserve the Knight films — and the rest of its archives.

Stenchwarrior (1335051) writes "I was in the car with my wife and 15 year old daughter this morning talking about the future of Facebook and how it's likely that they will not be around forever (or at least not at the same capacity as now) and my daughter asked "Well, what's going to happen to all of my pictures?"...it never occurred to her to that Facebook might not be around someday and all of those thousands of photos that she's uploaded might someday be gone. So this is what I ask the good people at Slashdot: What's a good way to preserve all of those memories? Many devices nowadays have direct access to the Internet and even to Facebook and once the images are uploaded they are eventually deleted to make room for more. How do we make sure we can access or backup those files in case Zuckerberg decides to sell out to Google or Microsoft and they do away with everyone's profiles?"

RedEaredSlider (1855926) writes "A group of scientists has asked if we might be on our way to a sixth mass extinction. There have been five others, most famously the K-T that wiped out the dinosaurs and Permian which wiped out 90 percent of all species (and paved the way itself for those dinosaurs). This one may be man-made, however."Link to Original Source

A traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet expressway has now entered its ninth day and has grown to over 62 miles in length. This mother-of-all delays has even spawned its own micro-economy of local merchants selling water and food at inflated prices to stranded drivers. Can you imagine how infuriating it must be to see someone leave their blinker on for 9 days?

Developer Fabien Sanglard has written a code review for id Software's iPhone port of Doom. It's an interesting look into how the original 1993 game (which he also reviewed to understand its rendering process) was adapted to a modern platform.
"Just like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom was rendering a screenframe pixel per pixel. The only way to do this on iPhone with an acceptable framerate would be to use CoreSurface/CoreSurface.h framework. But it is unfortunately restricted and using it would prevent distribution on the AppStore. The only solution is to use OpenGL, but this comes with a few challenges: Doom was faking 3D with a 2D map. OpenGL needs real 3D vertices. More than 3D vertices, OpenGL needs data to be sent as triangles (among other things because they are easy to rasterize). But Doom sectors were made of arbitrary forms. Doom 1993's perspective was also faked, it was actually closer to an orthogonal projection than a perspective projection. Doom was using VGA palette indexing to perform special effect (red for damage, silver for invulnerable...)."